This Saturday morning, randomly browsing I found this link on YouTube and heard the song.
I was deeply impressed!
My
sudden liking of Sanskrit sounds began when I heard the
Baahubali movie songs, which have some Sanskrit Shloks, especially the
song in which Baahubali lifts the Shivling and walks to the waterfall.
Listening to that in the movie Baahubali made me realize how beautiful
Sanskrit sounds! And listening to this song, Shiv Tandava Stotram, has
verified that opinion. This is a great track to listen to. Don’t miss
the visuals in the video.
I’ve
been a fan of heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Nightwish,
Within Temptation etc. but listening to this track I realize that even
though their songs are great, we do have a great advantage over such
bands. They sing songs in English and English language is not inherently
musical. It takes effort to find the right words to make it sing-song. I
know this because I’ve written poems and lyrics in English during my
college days (http://perpetualthoughts.wordpress.com/).
However in Sanskrit language, you can pick any Shlok and sing it the way you like and it will sound awesome!
In
India, just because we give English importance and Hindi is our (most
of us) mother tongue (and both taught since our first day in school),
most of us neglected Sanskrit studies in our school days (which starts
quite late in 5th or 6th standard). But over the years I’ve realized the
glaring limitations of English as a language and began to appreciate
Hindi and Sanskrit. For instance, English language has the concept of
Capital and small letters, clearly indicating the tendency to divide
people in upper/lower class or white/black race and so on. Whereas Hindi
and Sanskrit has no such distinction and all are contained under the
same horizontal line, denoting every Varna as equal! More on that later.
An
afterthought. These heavy metal bands have excellent music. My desire
is that if we take music of, say Iron Maiden, and write lyrics in
Sanskrit, we could have the best of both worlds! That would be a great
union of West and East and prove Mark Twain wrong.
And
for those of you who accept the good aspects of our culture only after
its validated by the West, here’s Bob Marley singing Om Namah Shivaay :)
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